How is the clock doing? Not long. I need to speed up.
News of the incident with Giorgio spread like wildfire and I was eyed with a combination of suspicion and respect.
Giorgio left London - although to this day I have no idea where he went. I appointed a young lad called Spencer Cline as my number two. This managed to piss off about half the team I worked with, as Spencer was a new recruit I had employed on Martin’s recommendation. Spencer had worked with Martin in London for a few years and I needed someone who was loyal to me and not the old school.
I dumped the nicely, nicely approach and went for the cold heartless bastard approach. I found I was good at it and kicking backsides was something I seemed to do well.
I re-organised the set up and appointed ten direct reports, each with their own remit. We met every Monday at 10.00am and Spencer was charged with taking the notes. He encrypted them and sent them out on the Tuesday. This was business and I had a target in my head – make south London number one.
This took balls. London wasn’t like Glasgow. You could walk a quarter of a mile in London and be on someone else’s patch. You could walk another ten yards and be in your grave. This was truly Long Good Friday land and, with one mind on how it all finished for Bob Hoskins, I had to get down and dirty.
I went after local gangs with a simple offer – join or cease to be. This led to more pitched battles than was good for a man. We fought where needed and some months we could be found knife in hand, gun in back pocket for fifteen nights straight. We rattled cages in a big way and we didn’t always win. But we won enough and a year after I joined we overhauled the north as the biggest earner.
I didn’t stop there. In less than eighteen months I was running out of steam south of the river. Most of the gangs that mattered were either on our side or were gone. Gaining new income was proving tougher. We set in motion some big jobs but these took time and were risky. So I turned my attention to the East End.
Technically this was north of the river but Giles was in no shape to tackle it. Unlike myself, Giles had taken a more laissez faire approach to his new job. After all it was already the biggest so why bust your nuts trying to grow it. As such he let a mean little fucker called Graham Stern go unchecked and he was now in control of most everything east of India Dock.
Graham was half German on his dad’s side and couldn’t have been more at home had he put on jackboots and a swastika. He was psychotic and like most psychopaths clever with it. Killing was no issue to him, as he didn’t value anyone but himself and his boyfriend - a circus acrobat called Helmut that hung around him like a cheap necklace.
Being gay back then still wasn’t acceptable but Graham had a wife for show and nobody messed with Graham and Helmut. If they did, they didn’t do it twice.
He worked out of an old mill in Silvertown and lived in the west end. He started work at six in the morning and was rarely home before midnight. I could see the writing on the wall even if my co-workers were blind. This boy was aiming for the top but neither Giles nor the old man seemed bothered. So I decided to go head to head and take him out.
I remember the night we went in. Dark as a fat man’s sphincter. The cloud cover was full and the moon new. The lighting in Silvertown was poor. The lateness of the hour was accompanied by a mist that drifted off the river and settled like a wet blanket on the roads.
There were twenty one of us. All armed and all fully aware of what we were getting into.
The operation was simple. The same old story - cut off the head of the monster and let the rest die. We concentrated everything on getting into Graham’s office and hitting him hard.
At first things went well. The darkness was good cover and the mist deadened any noise we made. The entrance to the industrial estate was unguarded and Stern’s office light blazed like a beacon from the third floor of the old mill. There were two guards at the entrance but they looked bored and were swigging liberally from a hip flask. By the time we landed on them they were too drunk to respond and we were in.
I hung back letting Spencer take point. We flooded up the stairs and into the office and hit trouble.
Our scout had told us there were three or four in the building but when we opened the door I counted five times that number. We had the element of surprise but not for long and instead of a quick in and out we ended up in a fire-fight while Stern fled.
I ordered Spencer and two others to follow me to chase down Stern. We left the team to slug it out and flew down the stairs to the sound of retreating gunfire. We caught the taillights of a BMW as it fishtailed out of the complex. Running for our car we gave chase but, in the mist, it was a hopeless cause and we lost them.
We cruised for an hour before heading back to Stern’s office. The fire-fight was over and we had control but without Stern it was a hollow victory. We leaned on his team but they were either too scared to talk or didn’t know where he was. I needed to finish this and finish it with pace.
Spencer piped up and suggested we try his home. It was a long shot but if he was going to go to ground he might try and fly by his house first. It was worth a shot.
I knew where he lived and, leaving my crew to clean up, we put metal to metal and screamed through a fog bound London.
Stern lived in a mews in the west end and by the time we got there the fog was taking on the grey of dawn. We stopped at the end of his road and I saw Stern’s car, engine running and door open, sitting at the far end.
He emerged with a briefcase in one hand, a screaming woman dragging her heels in the other. She was dressed for bed and it was clear that the current Mrs Stern wasn’t a happy bunny. I signalled for the others to follow me in.
I didn’t care if he got in the car as there was only one way out and we had enough firepower to bring down a Panzer tank.
He saw us when we were two doors from his house, leapt into the car and gunned the engine. Without closing the car door he slammed the car into reverse, and aimed for the middle of the road.
Spencer pulled out his gun and let loose. The rear window shattered, the car slewed to one side and smashed into the front door of the house nearest to us. We waited for Stern to emerge but, apart from the engine racing in neutral, and exhaust pouring into the night there was no other action.
Spencer walked up to the car door with his gun beaded on where Stern would exit. He reached the car and looked in. He turned round to look at me and drew his hand across his throat. It was all I needed to know and we left as Mrs Stern bore down on the car in hysterics.
The next morning I received a call from Giles. He was verging on apoplectic as he screamed down the phone. I let him rant and then hung up. Ten minutes later the boss phoned and asked what the hell was going on. I told him what had happened and why. He asked me to wait by the phone.
Half an hour later a car turned up outside the office and one of the boss’s bears hustled me into the back seat. We headed north to a small hotel in the village of Pangbourne on Thames. I was shown to a room at the back of the hotel and told to wait.
Ten minutes rolled by before the boss walked in.
With two bears in tow, he walked up to me and, knuckleduster in hand, cracked open my chin. I went down like a lump of clay and the bears played football with me for five minutes.
‘Stop,’ came the boss’s voice.
The football stopped and I was dragged back onto a chair.
‘Giles is out. You are in. The whole of London is yours but pull another trick like that without my permission and you’ll join Karl Marx up at Highgate Cemetery.’
With this he left and, with three busted ribs, a snapped wrist and a busted jaw I took a taxi back to London - stopping off at Gerry the Fix’s gaff for some emergency medical repairs.
How’s the clock? Eleven thirty nine and four seconds.
So there I was kingpin in London. Top of the tree and not yet thirty. I took to the new job with a ruthless streak that earned me the nickname ‘the bastard’. Unoriginal but accurate.
I was now earning more in a week than some of my old school friends would earn in a year. I kept Spencer as my number two, split London into five areas – north, south, east, west and the city - and put a body in place for each. I drove the organisation hard and turned it from an opportunistic, street-fighting mob into a sophisticated business. We embraced technology and the financial markets and turned from petty loan sharking to money, drugs and sex.
I lost four of my best men in early 1991 to a hit and run by a gang who came up from the south west with ambitions to knock me over. We repaid the favour by wiping out the entire gang. Most people will have heard of it. We crashed a turboprop with thirty people on board as it took off from Bristol airport. Sabotage was suspected but never proven.
In the summer of 1993 a money laundering scheme that had doubled our income in the previous six months went tits up in a bad way. The financial authorities sent in the heavy mob and they were the Andrews Liver Salts to our digestion. I lost six of my best men to Wormwood Scrubs for sentences ranging from three to eight years. I escaped by the skin of my teeth but my card was marked.
By now the police were wise to us in a big way but I was careful to give them little reason to talk to me. London was now over three quarters of the total income of the group and I was pushing to take control of the rest of England. I reckoned we could triple our income if I had the steering wheel.
Of course you can see what’s coming. Sadly so could the boss. I was no longer a valued asset. I was becoming a serious risk to his command.
One sunny Tuesday a blue Ford Escort parked outside my townhouse in Chelsea at five in the morning and, as I left the front door two hours later, it exploded - taking out half a block of London’s most expensive real estate.
I should have died but, as I left the house, I bent down to tie a shoe lace. The initial blast wave caught me in the backside and threw me into the basement well that sat beneath my front door. Out of the way of the main explosion I survived but was rendered deaf in one ear and suffered second degree burns to a fifth of my body. I had more cuts and bruises than could be counted and my Rolex was branded into my wrist. To this day I still carry the imprint of a watch on my skin.
I spent three months in hospital, all the time fearing that the boss would finish the job. But he had gotten sloppy in his old age and word was everywhere that he was behind the failed attempt on my life. He went to ground. I might have been known as ‘the bastard’ but at least I was a fair bastard and rule number one in our game is don’t shit on your own doorstep.
Two days before I left hospital a young man called Greg McAllister took a walk in Hyde Park with his pet Labrador. It was a routine he had been repeating for a fortnight and, as he had done for the previous fourteen mornings, he uttered a polite good morning to an old man in a jogging suit flanked by two human four by twos. Only this time he took a small pistol from his coat and emptied the gun into the old man before running off.
I was now in charge of the UK and had no intention of stopping there.